Networked and remote video game play has become increasingly popular. For several years now, game players using personal computers have played Doom, Quake and other multiplayer networked games over the Internet. Such multiplayer games can involve a number of different game players from all over the country or the world.
One especially interesting genre of remote video games uses a team approach where the various players align themselves in teams and work together to accomplish a particular objective (defeat another team, beat another team in locating a treasure or fulfilling some other quest, etc.). It is useful in these and other multiplayer video game contexts to allow the various game players to communicate with one another during game play. For example, members of the same team may wish to strategize so they can work together more effectively. Sometimes, players on opposite sides of a challenge may wish to communicate information or otherwise coordinate their game play. Adding an inter-player communications capability raises the fun factor substantially. Rather than simply sitting alone in front of a computer or television set moving a game character on a screen, the game play experience becomes much more interactive and personal when one is communicating with a group of friends or acquaintances.
While some game players have been known to talk together on the telephone while they are involved in remote game play, many in the gaming industry have sought to provide a chat capability as a part of or as an adjunct to the video game software. Early approaches, especially on PC games, provided a text chat capability allowing players to send text messages to one another. A player would use the keyboard to type in a message which was instantly sent over the same communications medium carrying interactive game play information back and forth. Such text messages could be replied to by other players in the same way to provide interactive text “chat” communications.
The effectiveness of such text chat capabilities depended on the type of game. For a relatively slow-moving long term adventure or other game, text chat could be quite effective in allowing players to coordinate their activities while at the same time communicating fun and interesting information about themselves. However, because of the required use of a keyboard to input the text information, many players found text chat to be somewhat incompatible with other types of games such as more fast-moving interactive games with time pressure. Many personal computer and other games are primarily controlled through use of a joystick or other game type controller. To send a text chat message, the user generally needed to move his or her hands off of the game controller onto a keyboard to begin typing. Once the user finished typing a message, he or she hit a “send” button and then returned to interacting with the video game using the joystick or other game controller. While the user's hands were on the keyboard, the user was often unable to interact with the game via the joystick. Such interruptions were found to be generally undesirable. Furthermore, not all game players have good typing skills. Younger game players or those who have not yet learned to touch type often found the keyboard to be an obstacle that tended to slow down fast-moving video game play.
To solve this problem and also take advantage of the relatively higher communications bandwidths now available to most gamers via DSL, cable or other communications means, several software developers and game companies developed voice chat capabilities for use in remote video game play. To use voice chat, game players typically put on headsets that include both earphones and a microphone. Software and hardware within the personal computer or gaming platform digitizes voice picked up by the microphone and transmits the resulting digital information to other game players. At the remote side, received digitized speech signals are converted back into audio, amplified and played back through remote game players' headsets. Voice chat eliminates the need for game players to use a keyboard while providing nearly instantaneous inter-player communications and coordination.
While voice chat has been widely adopted in the gaming community and has achieved a fair degree of success, text chat is still being used by some because of several advantages it provides over voice chat. Communicating with other online players in massive multiplayer online role playing games, for example, is still often provided by text chat rather than voice chat. Text chat provides a record of conversations so that players can review exactly what was said by other players, and also provides the ability to easily identify the player who sent a particular message (text can be tagged with a speaker's identity). In addition, using text chat, one player's statements can be easily separated from another player's statements since the text typically appears separately (this can also be done with voice chat using a half-duplex type communications system, but this might be somewhat frustrating to the speakers). Additionally, unlike most voice chat, text chat provides the ability to mask the player's true identity. This can be useful when the game play includes avatars that in effect provide an “alter ego” for each human player. For example, if a 12 year old boy is playing the role of a 40 year old warrior, voice chat can spoil or detract from the game play experience since the warrior ends up having the voice of a 12 year old. Additional advantages of text chat include the ability to monitor and censor player conversations for bad language, and reduction in the amount of bandwidth required to convey the information.
Despite the continued usefulness of text chat in some game play contexts, using the keyboard continues to have significant disadvantages, especially for console or other game platforms that do not include keyboards. A keyboard is a bulky accessory, and it detracts from game play if the user has to remove his hands from the controller to type a message. The impersonation problem with voice chat can be addressed by providing voice filters that alter the sound of a player's voice, but so far players have not generally been using such voice masking since the resulting sound quality can be relatively low and intelligibility ends up being sacrificed.
In some non-gaming contexts (e.g., America Online's Instant Messenger), some have attempted to provide a chat alternative in the form of voice-to-text conversion. However, further improvements in the gaming context are necessary and desirable if such techniques are to become more widely adopted.
The technology herein addresses these problems by providing a video game chat capability with voice-to-text conversion that identifies characteristics of the player's speech and selects text display formatting based on such identified characteristics. In more detail, a non-limiting illustrative exemplary implementation runs on a video game console or associated server and analyzes the player's speech to vary the font size, color or other text display formatting for display to other users. For example, if the amplitude of a player's voice is high, the text may be displayed to other users in a larger than normal font. If the voice sounds stressed or aggressive words are used, the text is displayed to other users in a special format (e.g., using a distinctive color such as red or other distinctive formatting). Other analysis may be done on speech in context to vary the text formatting options such as font size, color, font type, or other aspects of the text presentation and/or display.